The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Drumline
    If all this does not quite add up to a coherent movie, it does produce a bouncy, boisterous and charming one, which becomes downright thrilling when it shows the bands in action.
  2. The Hot Chick
    Rob Schneider runs an obstacle course of taste and emerges remarkably unsullied, considering the choices he faces.
  3. About Schmidt
    What makes this exquisitely observed slice of American screen realism transcend itself is finally its moral sensibility.
  4. Pellet
    As blunt as it is in depicting child abuse, El Bola is a movie steeped in an ambiguity that lends its conflicts a symbolic resonance.
  5. Analyze That
    Although there is the germ of a very sharp comedy in the intersection of real mobsters and make-believe thugs in a Hollywood mob comedy, Analyze That is far too lazy to do much with it.
  6. Empire
    Serves a reheated notion on a creaky TV tray.
  7. Blackboards
    An indelible and ultimately moving vision of humanity buffeted by the elements and by international political tides.
  8. Equilibrium
    If someone left "1984," "Fahrenheit 451," "Brave New World," "Gattaca" and the Sylvester Stallone potboilers "Judge Dredd" and "Demolition Man" out in the sun and threw the runny glop onto a movie screen, it would still be a better picture than Equilibrium, a movie that could be stupider only if it were longer.
  9. Adaptation.
    I realize that the fear of contracting writer's block from a fictional character is crazy, but in the brilliantly scrambled, self-consuming world of Adaptation it has a certain plausibility.
  10. Massoud, the Afghan
    I was struck by how personal this movie is, and by the delicate symbiosis that develops between biographer and subject. Mr. Ponfilly's presence in the film (mostly on the soundtrack and once or twice on camera) does not overshadow Massoud so much as filter our understanding of him.
  11. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Although the movie, adapted from a book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, pushes emotional buttons and simplifies its true story to give it the clean narrative sweep of an extended folk ballad, it never goes dramatically overboard.
  12. Dead or Alive: Final
    The home-movie crudeness of Dead or Alive: Final indicates it was made on the cheap with minimal preparation.
  13. Russian Ark
    A magnificent conjuring act, an eerie historical mirage.
  14. They
    Sensation, not sense, is the point of this exercise, and what it lacks in originality it makes up for in effective if cheap moments of fright and dread.
  15. Extreme Ops
    Ops is too brain-dead to play the incognito war criminal segment for comedy, although when Will is seen thumbing through the pages of a newspaper called USA Daily, the picture has inadvertently tumbled down a Mad magazine wormhole.
  16. Solaris
    Retooled into a sleek pop fable that doesn't bother to connect all its dots, the movie aspires to fuse the mystical intellectual gamesmanship of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the love-beyond-the-grave romantic schmaltz of "Titanic," without losing its cool. It's a tricky balancing act that doesn't quite come off.
  17. Eight Crazy Nights
    Festooned with yards of gross-out jokes, sniggering allusions and, astonishingly, a sentimental climax that's more repellent than any of the crude effluvia the film is drenched with.
  18. Die Another Day
    Perhaps the most satisfying Bond movie since "The Spy Who Loved Me."
  19. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    The cumulative effect is that of watching misspent lives disintegrate before your eyes. Ms. Miller's canny accomplishment is a triumph, giving the material weight and heart. This is one of the finest pictures of the year.
  20. The Emperor's Club
    Carefully sets itself up as an obvious, transparent morality play, and then just as deliberately refuses the easy payoff. This is both impressive and a little disingenuous: the film is in effect congratulating itself for refusing to offer a neat and tidy view of life without offering much else.
  21. The Quiet American
    Fowler may be the richest character of Mr. Caine's screen career. Slipping into his skin with an effortless grace, this great English actor gives a performance of astonishing understatement whose tone wavers delicately between irony and sadness.
  22. Phantom
    Both grueling and dull. Imagine (if possible) a Pasolini film without passion or politics, or an Almodóvar movie without beauty or humor, and you have some idea of the glum, numb experience of watching O Fantasma.
  23. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    A searching and wide-ranging debate has unfolded about America's response to terrorism and, more broadly, about the history and future of its role in the world. Mr. Junkerman's film is best understood as a necessary, if partisan, text in that continuing argument.
  24. Talk to Her
    When it's over, the realization of how much the movie means to you really sinks in; you can't get it out of your heart.
  25. Friday After Next
    The trouble with movies like those in the "Friday" series is that their success can lead to a need to inflate their importance, inviting pretentious descriptions like "folkloric" when "Friday" is much closer to chitlin circuit comedy.
  26. Better Housekeeping
    As broad and cartoonish as the screenplay is, there is an accuracy of observation in the work of the director, Frank Novak, that keeps the film grounded in an undeniable social realism.
  27. Hell House
    As a director, Mr. Ratliff wisely rejects the temptation to make fun of his subjects, most of whom seem to believe sincerely that they are doing the work of God.
  28. The Way Home
    The story, touching though it is, does not quite have enough emotional resonance or variety of incident to sustain a feature, and even at 85 minutes it feels a bit long. The premise, too, is a little thin.
  29. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    So good because it is one of those rare documentaries that combine information with smashing entertainment.
  30. Interview with the Assassin
    Mr. Burger has a performer who can dart between stentorian self-assurance and cringing pathos, maintaining his character's ambiguity until the final sequence of this resourceful and ingenious entertainment.
  31. Half Past Dead
    After several scenes of this tacky nonsense, you'll be wistful for the testosterone-charged wizardry of Jerry Bruckheimer productions, especially because Half Past Dead is like "The Rock" on a Wal-Mart budget. And the marked-down price tags are incredibly visible.
  32. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    A suds-filled political melodrama that bashes the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico with a contempt that verges on hysteria, could be accused of many things, but timidity is not one of them.
  33. Revolution #9
    An unadorned, unsparing chronicle of a young man's descent into a nightmare of delusion, paranoia and self-destructive behavior.
  34. Ararat
    Until its final moments this almost great movie feels as if it's racing against itself in a neck-and-neck battle between its troubled heart and its egg-shaped head. The heart wins by a nose.
  35. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    By the end, instead of feeling stirred to a high pitch of anxiety and excitement, you may feel battered and worn down. But not, in the end, too terribly disappointed.
  36. Hush!
    Rambling, occasionally very funny reflection on the meaning of family in contemporary Japan.
  37. The Rising Place
    This misty-eyed Southern nostalgia piece, in treading the line between sappy and sanguine, winds up mired in tear-drenched quicksand.
  38. Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet
    The cinematic equivalent of sampling goodies from a spartan tastings menu in which the entrees, desserts and appetizers are confusingly jumbled together.
  39. Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite
    If these two can figure out a way to love each other, maybe it isn't necessary for us to like them very much.
  40. The Bread, My Sweet
    Pretty much of a mess, full of narrative gaps and characters who arbitrarily appear and disappear. But it is at least a sweet, good-natured mess, with none of the overcalculation and condescending cynicism the same material would almost certainly bring out in a Hollywood production.
  41. Far From Heaven
    It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre -- and a period-- too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it's divine.
  42. 'R Xmas
    Once Ice-T sticks his mug in the window of the couple's BMW and begins haranguing the wife in bad stage dialogue, all credibility flies out the window.
  43. 8 Mile
    What Mr. Hanson has done with 8 Mile is make a pop movie instead of a movie about pop. There's nothing disreputable about this.
  44. Leela
    Veers between the light naturalism of American television and the pulsing melodrama of Bollywood entertainment.
  45. Femme Fatale
    The story, to the extent that it is comprehensible, is pretentious and banal, closer to "Vanilla Sky" than "Notorious." But Mr. De Palma proves that, in the absence of insight or ideas, some amazing things are possible. It is possible, for instance, to be entranced by a movie without believing it for a second.
  46. Diario di una siciliana ribelle
    Loaded down with rhetorical devices -- writer and director, Marco Amenta, drowns it in a flood of sentimental effusions.
  47. Strange Fruit
    Polished, well-structured film.
  48. Justifiable Homicide
    The filmmakers build an argument that is both intellectual and emotional, concentrating as much on the forensic evidence as on Ms. Rosario's passionate commitment to finding justice for her son.
  49. Treasure Planet
    The delicate magic of, for instance, Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," which Disney released earlier this fall, is absent from this brainless, mechanical picture.
  50. The Weight of Water
    There is so much to admire in The Weight of Water, Kathryn Bigelow's churning screen adaptation of a novel by Anita Shreve, that when the movie finally collapses on itself late in the game, it leaves you in the frustrating position of having to pick up its scattered pieces and assemble them as best you can.
  51. Tully
    The movie's unhurried rhythm eventually works a quiet spell, and after a while you find yourself settling back, adjusting to the film's bucolic metabolism and appreciating its eye and ear for detail.
  52. Love in the Time of Money
    A listless and desultory affair.
  53. Daughter from Danang
    May not be a great piece of filmmaking, but its power comes from its soul's-eye view of how well-meaning patronizing masked a social injustice, at least as represented by this case.
  54. The Santa Clause 2
    Captures the true spirit of the holiday. It's mildly sentimental, unabashedly consumerist (with anything-but-subliminal advertisements for McDonald's hamburgers and Nestlé candy tucked inside), studiously inoffensive and completely disposable.
  55. I Spy
    Even the handful of moments that are amusing feel recycled from old sketches of Mr. Murphy's.
  56. Besotted
    Like a soft drink that's been sitting open too long: it's too much syrup and not enough fizz.
  57. Santa vs. the Snowman
    It is best appreciated as an immersion in a three-dimensional toyland outfitted with enough whimsical gadgetry to fill a thousand playrooms.
  58. Food of Love
    Tossed by successive waves of floridity and biliousness, Food of Love finally washes up on the shores of camp.
  59. The Bank
    The upshot is a whopper of an ending that is as silly as it is satisfying.
  60. All the Queen's Men
    Rarely has a movie worked so hard to be so inconsequential.
  61. Frida
    At its best when it forsakes earnest psychological exposition for magic realism, when, instead of trying to explain Kahlo's life, it conjures the moods and sensations that fed her art.
  62. By Hook or by Crook
    The essential humanity of the characters shines through, giving face and form to a subculture the movies have largely neglected.
  63. The Truth About Charlie
    You may be taken by the director's enormous enthusiasm, but the picture doesn't quite work.
  64. Paid in Full
    An unpretentious, sociologically pointed slice of life.
  65. All or Nothing
    All the drinking, arguing and brooding, which in lesser hands might have produced oppressive and unvarying dreariness, somehow adds up to a tableau of extraordinary vividness and variety.
  66. Roger Dodger
    One of the juiciest male characters to pop up in an independent film this year.
  67. Ghost Ship
    So preoccupied with delivering its effects that it doesn't bother to make sense of its story.
  68. Jackass: The Movie
    Like a documentary version of "Fight Club," shorn of social insight, intellectual pretension and cinematic interest. It also offers a supremely literal-minded version of slapstick.
  69. Derrida
    The adoring and adorable documentary on the philosopher Jacques Derrida.
  70. Fidel
    This is bad cinema and bad history. Ms. Bravo is unstinting in her praise for the omelet and her admiration of the chef, but she refuses to admit that she's walking on eggshells.
  71. Le bossu
    Mr. de Broca's film is full of durable cinematic pleasures: a little sex, a lot of sword fighting and a plot that combines heady passion with complicated political intrigue.
  72. The Business of Fancydancing
    Although the film is initially clumsy and a little hard to follow, Mr. Alexie takes his time in setting his characters in play, and the visual clunkiness becomes secondary to the eloquent emotional desolation.
  73. Naqoyqatsi
    By far the grimmest of these nonnarrative, nonverbal cinematic tone poems with epic ambitions. Although none of the three could be described as cheery, Naqoyqatsi, whose title is the Hopi Indian term for war as a way of life, reeks of doomsday.
  74. Real Women Have Curves
    Effervescent and satisfying, a crowd pleaser that does not condescend.
  75. Abandon
    A thriller wrapped in heavy-duty gauze to muffle the chills.
  76. The Grey Zone
    Certainly an honorable film. But honorable is not always watchable.
  77. Goyangileul butaghae
    As it abruptly crosscuts among the five friends, it fails to lend the characters' individual stories enough dramatic resonance to make us care about them.
  78. Auto Focus
    Gets to you like a low-grade fever, a malaise with no known antidote. When it was over, I wasn't sure if I needed a drink, a shower or a lifelong vow of chastity.
  79. The Ring
    While impressively made, this impassive and cold feature fails, in a spectacular fashion, to deliver the thrills.
  80. Formula 51
    A witless, gruesome barrage of jokey violence and lame trans-Atlantic humor, kept moving by the pointless, derivative kineticism of Mr. Yu's hyperactive cuts and splices.
  81. Blink of an Eye
    Requires a bit more energy and originality to set it apart from the run of the indie pack.
  82. Stealing the Fire
    The material is disparate and wide ranging, and it is often difficult to follow Mr. Friedman and Mr. Nadler down all the side streets and back alleys of their investigation.
  83. Comedian
    Instead of prying into his soul, the filmmakers investigate his working conditions and offer a sort of backstage ethnographic study of the professional stand-up culture.
  84. Brown Sugar
    Sustains the charm of an early 60's New York romance.
  85. Family Fundamentals
    An earnest study in despair.
  86. Pokémon 4: The Movie
    When it comes to entertainment, children deserve better than Pokémon 4Ever.
  87. Knockaround Guys
    When it comes to father, sons and mob life, stick to "The Godfather."
  88. Below
    Has the bad luck to come on the heels of Kathryn Bigelow's beautifully made and politically impassioned "K-19," making this submarine picture -- a relatively modest, low-budget affair -- seem skimpy by comparison.
  89. The Rules of Attraction
    The harder the movie tries to shock, the shriller it rings.
  90. The Transporter
    American audiences will probably find it familiar and insufficiently cathartic.
  91. Ash Wednesday
    This time Mr. Burns is trying something in the Martin Scorsese street-realist mode, but his self-regarding sentimentality trips him up again.
  92. Punch-Drunk Love
    Poetry is perhaps the best way to think about Mr. Anderson's suave, exuberant balance of free-form inspiration and formal control.
  93. Safe Conduct
    The movie is full of juices that give it a healthy, pungent flow.
  94. Tuck Everlasting
    An effective, well-made film that will certainly please its target audience of preteen girls.
  95. White Oleander
    The accumulation of sharp candid flashes adds up to a disturbing vision of Los Angeles as a teeming jungle of dysfunction.
  96. Bowling for Columbine
    Disturbing, infuriating and often very funny film.
  97. Swept Away
    There is no credible feeling here, no comedy, no eroticism.
  98. How to Draw a Bunny
    An intriguing and entertaining introduction to Johnson through his varied art; the mystery surrounding his death, which may have been his final performance piece, and the reminiscences of contemporaries.
  99. Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie
    The animation is competent, and some of the gags are quite funny, but Jonah never shakes the oppressive, morally superior good-for-you quality that almost automatically accompanies didactic entertainment.
  100. Heaven
    Here the clinical, stopwatch precision of Mr. Tykwer's explorations of synchronicity and Kieslowski's warmer, metaphysically dreamy speculations about the role of chance and coincidence in human affairs synchronize into a film whose formal elegance is matched by its depth of feeling.
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